The Unlucky Man (13 page)

"Now it’s down to Loess."

After making the call, Loess waited. It felt strange to be back in the City after so long spent on the other side of the bridge: so big and busily impersonal. At the same time, she couldn’t remember a time when she had so much time alone to think.

For months she had slept in shared rooms, in safe houses, sometimes bunked up with her companions, sometimes on the floor in a sleeping bag until their smells, their small noises and the heat of them had become second nature to her, an ambient white noise as familiar as her own heartbeat. In some ways this new silence was breathtaking, in others it was terrifying.

Being back on this side of the city was odd too. Of course, she’d travelled over often enough in the past, but always for short spaces of time, to meet someone, to buy something, to trade information.

Although she’d been born on this side of the bridge, she’d never felt at home here. She’d been a runaway at a young age, fleeing a bleak and broken future on this side of the Links, she had made for herself a new life on the far shore. She’d been lucky to fall in with Happen when he was on his way up, had never looked back to this side with any longing. The Old Quarter might have become a lawless warzone, but it was still, she supposed, the only home she’d ever known. Nothing lasts forever.

She didn’t have to wait long. Within a few minutes of hanging up a black SUV, parked on the street opposite the building, roared into life and shot off towards the center of city. Would there be more, she wondered. If there were others they were keeping their distance. There was only one way to find out.

She exited the car and walked with purpose towards the main door to the lobby and let herself in using the services button. So far so un-accosted she quickly made her way up an empty staircase that had seen better days to the first floor and Hesker’s apartment. Now came the moment of truth.

For as long as she dared, she listened at the door, ear pressed to the scratchy wood but could hear nothing from within. The air in the corridor was cold and unquiet, whispering over bare boards and faded cream walls. Paint peeled and spiders spun webs as she waited. Everywhere was silent.

Letting out a long, slow lungful of air Loess, steeling herself, knelt and inserted a long flex of wire into the mechanism of the lock, followed by a shorter, sharper pick. She twisted, listening intently for the faint tick-tock as she rotated the wire until, with a click that sounded deafening in the expectant corridor, the lock turned over.

Again, Loess waited, breath held, straining for the tell tale sign of movement from within the foreign apartment. She stood still in the breathing corridor for over a minute before finally, exhaling loudly, easing down the handle and slipping inside, closing the door fast behind her, sealing herself in.

Inside, the space opened out into an open-plan kitchen living room space and the same feeling of discontinuity broke over her in a brief wave. Hesker’s modest apartment seemed huge to her. How could anyone fill so much space to live in? And yet the quiet seclusion from the outside world was almost intoxicating in its decadence.

Easy, she warned herself, with a mental shake of the head. Just get the job done, get in and get out, you’ve been out of the real world for too long.

It was only in stepping away from the door that she noticed a small device in the upper right corner, a tiny flashing receiver skipping from red to green. It was a bug, placed there to monitor comings and goings from the apartment and she had just broken the thin filament connecting the door to the lintel, the end of which she could see like a tiny, shining piece of gossamer rising at an angle from the plastic ball. So, they would know someone was in the building. Better get a move on, she thought.

Crossing into the sitting room she had a sudden reckless whim that she might rifle Hesker’s things, take him some clothes, but dismissed the idea almost immediately; no time for such sentimental thinking she chided herself, picking up the phone receiver from a cupboard unit cluttered with take-away menus and pieces of paper - the minutiae of a different life, a life that was now over, she thought with a sad half smile. She hit redial. It seemed to ring for a lifetime. Come on, she started whispering imploringly after the first couple of hollow rings went unanswered. Come on come on come on come on come on.

"Hello?"

It was so sudden that she almost dropped the phone in surprise. The voice was hesitant, slightly distorted and she had a sudden intuition that the speaker had been staring at his ringing telephone for a long time, weighing up whether or not to answer. God, she thought, I’m turning into Mr. Happen.

"Carver Whimsy?"

"Oh shit," Whimsy muttered, "I’m getting a really bad sense of déjà vu."

"Um." Suddenly Loess’s mind had hit a blank as she realised that she hadn’t for a second considered what she was going to say if she ever made it far enough to make contact with the elusive Whimsy, a prospect which at ground level had seemed pretty unlikely. "I’m a friend of Jon Hesker’s," she tried.

"Ah. Yes," came the reply from the handset. "The dead Mr. Hesker."

"I guess?" she said, trying to find a deeper meaning in the words. They’d told her some of what had happened to Hesker on the ride over, between making their plans, but she wasn’t sure she was ready to buy into his resurrection wholly just yet.

"Only he isn’t dead is he?" Whimsy continued. "Which I find a peculiarity given that I saw him take a bullet over at Central and he looked pretty near to dead to me."

Loess had no idea how to respond to this but she knew she was probably running out of time. She could feel it ticking away with every tiny pop and crackle on the line.

"He’d like to talk to you," she said, supposing simple honesty might be as good a bet as any, deciding to simply ignore anything she couldn’t nail down. Whimsy was quiet for a long time, so long in fact that she thought that maybe the connection had been cut.

"Hello?" she said at last, "You still there?"

"Yes," he said at length in a voice that spoke of resignation to a life that looked likely to be full of complications from here on in.

"OK I’ll bite." But whatever else he might have been about to say was put on hold as the boards creaked in the hallway outside the apartment and a very definite shadow fell over the gap at the base of the door.

"Hold that thought," Loess whispered into the mouthpiece, as she padded delicately and soundlessly over to the door and pressed herself flat against the wall as the jarring sound of a key scraping in the lock filled the small room. Then the door was opening, a shadow crossing the threshold like a vampire in some Victorian penny dreadful horror story.

Without hesitation, Loess lashed out with the phone, smashing the handset into the face of the interloper. He grunted and she brought the full force of her knee straight into his stomach, coshing the phone into his face a second time as he doubled over, flipping his lights out for a little while.

"Hello?" she breathed into the receiver.

"What the fuck was that?" demanded Whimsy, still hanging on the other end.

"Company," she replied. "And there’ll be more where it came from so I have to go."

"Alright," he said. "Alright. OK, listen. You heard of the Old Town Motel? If not, look it up. Go there. Wait for me. I’m burning this number now so no more callbacks." With that he hung up and she was left listening to the empty flat-line of the dial tone.

Loess looked around the small apartment one last time as the atonal buzz sounded like a bell in her ear then, with a small shake of her head and a smile, she tossed the phone onto the couch.

It was a pipe dream, she thought, making her way out of the fire escape, the cold outside air hitting her like a slug of whiskey that tasted like rain and city streets.

We were really gunning it now, the hearse’s engine screaming like an animal in pain. The SUV was still tailing us but I had the sense that our lead was increasing with each frenetically passing second. Corg must have been doing some serious tinkering under the hearse’s hood.

"I think-" I started to say but at that moment a second car, a sleek black hybrid, recklessly piloted by the same crazy-eyed killer who had started all of this for me, screeched mercilessly out of nowhere and smashed into our left hand side. Metal screamed and buckled as we left the road, crunching into the curb. Wheels spinning helplessly, we pirouetted into the air, skidded, flipped.

The windshield popped then shattered, spraying us with tiny bullets of rounded glass and we were still moving, spinning, another crunch, pain, constriction and the smell of burning as we bounced and slid and imploded. The noise was incredible. For a brief moment I saw the SUV, which must have ploughed straight into the other car, was also rolling, end over end, wheels spinning helplessly. It looked like a turtle marooned on its back. And then all I could see was the mist and the cold sky and then again the road as it rushed round to welcome us once more.

At last we stopped moving, stranded with our wheels pointing to heaven, though the hearse continued to make noise, moaning eerily to itself. There was blood in my mouth from somewhere and for the second time that day my ears were ringing and my head felt like it had been pressed in a vice.

With an effort I managed to un-clinch my seatbelt to fall heavily onto the compacted roof. Broken glass tinkled ominously beneath me as I hauled myself out, groggy and confused, onto the road.

The air was thick with smoke and soupy fog that seemed to be rushing in to fill the atmosphere, cold and clinging. As I looked at my hands pressed against the grey tarmac, for a moment it seemed like the ground beneath me had slipped away, replaced by a yawning chasm of inky nothing. Curls of mist burned and charred away from the pit, a string of bloody spit trailing from my open mouth sizzled before dropping into nothing. I screwed up my eyes, head pounding, and when I opened them again there was road beneath me once more, rough and grey and beaded with dewy droplets of mist.

A figure slumped down next to me.

"Corg?" I croaked. He patted my shoulder in recognition as other figures appeared out of the haze: men in black carrying automatic rifles and training them on our position. Wearily, I pushed myself to my feet.

"Stay on the ground," a voice commanded, hoarse with smoke and muffled behind a protective mask. Squinting through the swirling mist I could see that our pursuers were somewhat the worse for wear as well, torn and scuffed, much as we were, by the crash.

"On the ground," he said again, though neither of us made any move to comply. I didn’t like the way the guns were moving around – a nervous jerkiness permeated the group, as obvious to me as the tangy taste of copper in my mouth.

The nearest figure, the speaker, ripped off his mask revealing sandy blond hair and handsome features. "Quinn," one of the others began to say but Quinn waved him into silence. His eyes had a haunted, open look to them and his finger remained locked to the trigger even as the barrel of his rifle wavered.

And then another figure emerged from the mist which, though it parted for Quinn and his team, seemed to cling to the newcomer much as it did to me, lending him an ethereal sinister aspect.

"Wychelo?" Quinn croaked as the strange eyed killer advanced on us. Somehow, despite his actions in the crash, Wychelo still looked immaculate and unruffled, as if he’d stepped from a salon rather than the burning wreck of his car. I felt a pressure building in my skull and the mist closed in even more. I was almost ready for the feeling this time as the shadow moved.

"Control wants these two alive," Quinn said, turning towards Wychelo so that the business end of his rifle now pointed at him. A flicker of annoyance played over the killer’s previously impassive features.

"Lower your weapon," he said evenly but, although the barrel wavered, Quinn kept his rifle raised, barrel levelled at Wychelo’s chest.

"What’s going on out here?" Quinn growled. The mist seemed to be circling him, growing thicker around him, clinging at his mouth. It was almost like he was breathing it in, being infected by its insidious tendrils.

"Lower your weapon," Wychelo repeated as the mist rolled around him, drawing a tight circle around us all. He had, I noticed, a suppressed pistol in his hand hanging loosely, almost casually, at his side.

The blood was pounding in my ears, sweat beading on my brow and prickling down my neck. A white wall now penned our small drama in, like players on a stage. The closer Wychelo came, the stronger the tension became; it was like there was a cord running between us, stretched almost to breaking point. The sense of another world overlaying this one surfaced nauseatingly once more. For a split second I had the distinct feeling that there were figures waiting in the impenetrable mist, indistinct and intangible. I could see them when I closed my eyes, grey shapes cast against the blackness of my eyelids. Eyes opened, I could still feel their still presence.

The moment passed, but my sense of them still remained, like reality was stretching, being strained and extended like an overfilled balloon, ready to rip under the strain at any moment. Something shifted in the murk, a wet whisper of noise. By now the others could sense it too, I was sure.

"What was that?" one of the ops shouted, squinting off into the mist. Others followed, his lead, their attention suddenly no longer locked on Corg and me.